The robot is an important part of our branding

At the pharmacy in Naestved Shopping Center the A3000 robot has made a difference for both customers and staff. Almost all manual tasks have been eliminated and the staff has much more time to advise customers on their medicine purchases, making the business much more efficient and customer focused.

Every day is a busy day at the pharmacy in Naestved Shopping Center. Nevertheless, the waiting time per customer is down to a minimum. Even though the pharmacy is making more than 500 customer transactions in just one day, customers are being serviced within just 1 minute. The reason for this efficiency is the APOSTORE A3000 robot, which was installed 3 years ago. According to Pharmacist and Owner Jacob Hjelme the robot has become nothing less than part of their business branding.

Jacob Hjelme confirms that the customers are well aware of the robot’s skills. When the clerk enters the request on computer its only a matter of seconds before the robot spits out the product in a hatch behind the counter.

Say the word ‘robot’ and most people think of something out of a sci-fi movie. But in reality, robots are so much more and are able to release time and resources for people to do the assignments that robots still can’t fulfill. At the pharmacy in Naestved the staff no longer spend time doing inventory, putting products on the shelves, sorting products according to expiration dates etc. Instead the staff has more time to talk to the customers and advise them on medicine and health.

Inventory management

Its one long positive statement when you ask Jacob Hjelme about the advantages of the A3000 and the difference it has made at his three pharmacies. When stocking products, all the staff need to do is scan the item and place it on the robot’s conveyer belt. The stock may look a bit chaotic to humans, but the robot has its own advanced algorithm for organizing the products according to top sellers, expiration date and other specifications, and the robot can provide a precise overview of the stock at any time.

Any product going in to the robot, is both scanned and photographed to make sure that all data on the package matches the data in the database. If not, the robot will reject the item forcing the staff to double check the correctness of the product in question. This feature takes safety in medicine distribution to a whole new level.

“The robot provides an extremely high level of security in medicine handling. We know exactly what’s in stock and the robot even communicates with our logistics warehouse making sure that we always have sufficient stock in all product categories,” says Jacob Hjelme. All these processes are happening automatically giving him more time to concentrate on managing and developing his business.

Better work environment

Before the robot was installed at the pharmacy, the staff would spend several hours a day doing manual tasks. By optimizing these work flows with the high-tech robot, the employees find their job much less trivial and much more interesting. They wouldn’t dream of working at a pharmacy that did not have a robot to do the monotonous tasks.

The pharmacy in Naestved is one out of three pharmacies owned by Jacob Hjelme. All three pharmacies are managed with the help of an Apostore robot. It gives great flexibility to the team that everyone can manage all the daily tasks at the pharmacy and the staff rotates between the three divisions whenever necessary.

The Apostore A3000 is the Rolls Royce version in pharmacy robots and the installation took about 3 months from the first surveys to the robot was fully operational.